BBC - Argentina has decided to make public all secret archives of the armed forces to help uncover human rights violations committed under military rule.

The decision was announced by Defence Minister Nilda Garre.

It comes on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the coup, by which the military seized power in 1976.

Human rights groups say up to 30,000 political opponents of the regime were kidnapped, detained and later executed during seven years of military rule.

The government issued a decree to guarantee unrestricted access to information on what it said were grave acts committed during the so-called Dirty War.

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Even 23 years after the end of the withering military dictatorship that gripped the country, the disclosure was made that elements in the Argentine navy maintained an active domestic spying program against officials, journalists, and leading celebrities in the arts and sciences.

Lingering Darkness
The story broke last Friday when police raided the intelligence office at the Almirante Zar naval base in the southern province of Chubut, according to EFENews. That base had been the scene of unspeakably vile crimes during the dirty war. The investigation was sparked by a complaint filed by the famed Argentine human rights NGO, the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), which later revealed that the Naval office maintained a number of dossiers on Argentine groups and individuals ranging from unions to indigenous rights movements. The apparently comprehensive spying program reportedly included such high profile targets as Néstor Kirchner (who was active in Patagonian politics prior to winning the presidency), and Defense Minister Nilda Garré.

Twenty six folders were seized, and according to the governor of Chubut, Mariano Das Neves, the dossiers contained information that was typical of the “ideological control” of past eras, and that “30 years ago [it] would have resulted in people [secret agents] coming to your house.” Reports suggest that the files went into extensive detail, and Das Neves noted that they included “analysis about the children of officials, elements of their private lives, even about alleged addictions to drink or personal relationships.”

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MEMORIA
“Nos sentimos protegidas, acompañadas por tantos jóvenes. No me podía imaginar que viniese tanta gente”, alcanzó a decir una emocionada Hebe de Bonafini en el momento en que subía al palco ubicado en la mitad de la Plaza de Mayo. Mientras los chicos gritaban “Madres de la Plaza, el pueblo las abraza”, León Gieco empezó el recital. La canción que todos le pidieron, no podía ser otra, fue La memoria.

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from Pagina/12 a left-wing Buenos Aires daily that is devoting today's issue to memories of the coup and the dictatorship.

"Los chicos" are of course at least grandchildren of people of Las Madres' generation. Most of the desaparecid@s were from my generation, or a bit older... I have friends who lived through that horror.

Edited to add: My inbox is full of stuff about the 30th anniversary of the coup, but its all in Spanish or Italian. (Argentina has the highest percentage of people of Italian descent outside Italy in the world). I've found a BBC report on the commemoration in English and will look for other things.

[ 24 March 2006: Message edited by: lagatta ]

The 24th of March is a dark day for antifascists. As well as the Argentine coup, it is also the anniversary of the Ardeatine Massacre a revenge massacre of over 300 Roman citizens (mostly antifascists and/or Jews, but some simply rounded up from the street).

More on the Ardeatine massacre.

I guess my mother's side didn't have it as bad as the Italian's with being occupied. Although mum said she was too close to the bombing for comfort when she was working nightshifts up north for Steel, Peaches and Tozer's(Belgian) and Rolls Royce(Spitfire engines) after that. She said they were rationed in the cities, but farming families seemed to have it better where food was concerned. Of course, there was supposed to be a plan in place to deal with a possibility the Nazis actually invaded England. Mum used to say yeah right, they relied on Labour party's contingency plans for food and other rationing from WWI. That was the plan while everyone carried gas masks.

Ah! What's this about the rat line ...

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What is still hidden is the extent to which the Western "democracies" supported the Nazis before, during and after the Second World War. Among the Nazis who escaped using Ratlines were Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, Aribert Heim and Ante Pavelic, who were smuggled to Latin America. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, as a whole Ukrainian Waffen SS were settled in Canada alone.

It was not only the question of spying on the former Soviet Union as they claim now. These Nazis were seen as a reliable force in the eyes of the rulers of the Western capitalist governments against the possibility of any working class uprising. How useful they were we can learn from the Chilean experience where, after 1973, Nazis – who had settled in Chile after the Second World War – offered their skills in torturing trade unionists and other left wing activists under the CIA-backed Pinochet military regime.

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In Argentina, where there were a lot of Jewish people in left movements, Jews were singled out for "special treatment" with scenarios based on Nazi death camps, had swastikas scrawled or carved onto their bodies, etc. (I have a friend in Argentina who lived through the Dirty War whose parents fled the Warsaw ghetto and who has no other surviving relatives - fortunately he escaped capture in Argentina).

And of course Indigenous rights have always been trampled, down there as up here, but the Operation Condor dictatorships brought an ever more brutal denial of Aboriginal rights and theft of land and resources, with no protest movements possible.

Text in Spanish

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The coups d'etat which Argentinians suffered in the 20th century have had a large, sad, difficult history, and were not simply military episodes. Sectors of society, of the press, of the church, of the Argentinian political class, some sectors of the citizenship also played a part each time that the constitutional order was subverted. I say this because not everyone has yet recognized their responsibility.

When someone opens the doors of the barracks to take power away from the democratic institutions, many have previously come together to bash down those institutions; powerful economic interests with pathetically little representation, then or now, worked tirelessly to deteriorate the democratic institutions and facilitate the final blow against the Constitution...

From March 24, 1976, they applied a co-ordinated and systematic plan of extermination and generalized repression, with a carefully calculated human cost, submitting thousands of people to kidnapping, torture and death, converting them into the "forever absent" as the person most responsible for the crimes cynically proclaimed. Thousands more were sent to jail without charges or through illegal proceedings, and many thousands more managed to survive only by fleeing the country. Hundreds of children were torn from their mothers' arms after being born in captivity, bereft of their identities and their families. These were not excesses; they were not invididual acts; they were part of a criminal plan, an institutionalized action designed long before March 24...

The intent of the dictatorial power was to make the whole nation would submit to their arbitrary acts, to their omnipotence. They sought a society divided, immobilized and obedient, and to this end they broke it and emptied it of everything that could move it, nullified its vitality and its dynamism, prohibited everything from politics to art.

Only in this way could they impose a political and economic project to replace the process of industrial substitution of imports for a new model of structural adjustment, with the role of the state diminished, increased foreign debt, flight of capital, and above all, a social discipline which allowed the establishment of an order that the democratic system would not grant them.

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The Argentine Presidency's official site needs a better proofreader, though:

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PALABRAS DEL PRESIDENTE NÉSTOR KIRCHER

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Oh, well. It happens.

[ 25 March 2006: Message edited by: lagatta ]